When somebody says “My website is amazing! You should definitely visit it,” that’s not very persuasive. You have no way of judging whether the website really is amazing, or whether that person is just trying to puff up a website that’s really not amazing at all.

It’s much more convincing when someone other than the site’s owner recommends the site – or even better, when lots of other people recommend the site. That’s why it’s important to build backlinks.

Even without specifically saying “This website is amazing,” people can show their trust in a website every time they build quality links to the site. If you approve of a certain website enough to put a link to that site on your own page, then everybody who trust you will probably trust the site you linked to.

How Your Blog Can Benefit From Quality Backlinks

When you build quality links to your blog on other people’s websites, you benefit in two ways:

First, the number of visitors to your site gets a boost. You get all the visitors you would normally get, plus all the visitors to that other site who click your link.

Secondly, your SERP ranking gets a boost. The more you build backlinks to high-authority sites on your page, the higher your website will rank in the SERPs.

And a higher place in the SERPs is something that would make any blog owner happy! All it takes is a bit of strategic link building! Google is constantly on the lookout for ways to improve the algorithms it uses to rank search results, so things could change in the future.

However, one thing’s for sure: high quality backlinks will always improve a page’s Google rankings. And seeing how influential Google is, improving a page’s Google rankings is always important.

Broken Link Building Strategy

Links that don’t work are one of the most frustrating things ever, whether you’re looking for particular information or are just browsing.

You trawl the internet, you start getting a sense of available options, you rule out some that are not available in your area, you’re getting really close to getting exactly the result you’re looking for – and then when you click the link, all you see is a 404 error.

That’s a broken link. In addition to being very annoying, every broken link you have harms your site traffic figures as well.

By giving your users a bad experience of your site, they can cause your visitors to give up in disgust and look for a different site. In turn, this will harm your sales and decrease clicks on your links. More importantly, for the blog owner, it will harm your Google rankings. If your site visitors are having a bad experience of your site because of broken links, Google’s crawlers will have this same bad experience when they visit your site.

On the other hand, every time you find a link that doesn’t work on another website, you get the opportunity to do some link building.

How to Find Broken Links?

If you are a blog owner, finding and fixing links on your own pages that no longer work properly is an important thing to keep doing on a regular basis.

But when you find other sites with links that don’t work, and those sites belong to your competitors, that creates an opportunity to build quality links by replacing those broken links with awesome backlinks to your own domain.

If you notify somebody that there is a link on their site that isn’t working, and you offer to replace it with a link to your site, chances are, the person will accept your offer. When you want to build backlinks, the first thing you need to do is make a list of every website you really hope has a broken link.

If you already know who your competitors are, you can just go ahead and make a list of them. Otherwise, trust Google to give you a good idea of who they are based on a few well-chosen keywords.

Google Chrome has free tools and plugins to help you identify broken links on these pages, or you can purchase various packages to help you build backlinks from any reputable SEO company.

The good thing about those extensions is that they’re free, which makes them ideal for any solo blog owner.

Finding broken links pointing to competitors’ websites and replacing them with inbound links to your own website is the primary goal of broken link building strategies, but don’t neglect your own website either.

Every blog owner should manually scroll through their pages, and click on their links, to confirm that nothing has gone wrong with any of them.

How to Fix Broken Links?

Internal links are links to pages on your own site, and they are easy to fix. Fixing a broken page on your own site is no different from creating the page in the first place, so you or your IT technician can just go ahead and change or remove it as desired.

It is a good idea to update all your pages regularly and remove content or links that are out of date or that don’t work correctly.

When external links, which are links on your own website linking to other websites, get broken, you don’t have access to the page where the error is. You’ll need to ask the site owner to fix the problem – if you still want that link. If you don’t think it adds much value, you could just remove it altogether.

When you remove the non-functional links, this gives you the opportunity to build quality links in their place. If you manage to replace a broken external link with a link to a site with a higher DA score, that’s an added bonus.

You’ll be making sure your visitors don’t have a frustrating experience when they visit your site AND you’ll be boosting your own site’s DA. If you’re willing to pay for it, you can also make use of one of the many outreach link building services available from any reputable SEO company. Buzznberry’s broken link building services is one of the best!

Building Quality Links: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness

In our everyday speech, “to Google” has become a recognized verb. You don’t need to say, “to search online using Google”. Google stands out so far above other search engines that it might as well be the only one.

Therefore, before you can maximize the discoverability of your blog post, you need to understand what Google is looking for. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, was responsible for the inspiration behind the idea of EAT.

In the world of academia, one of the most important ways of assessing the quality of a book or article is to check whether other reputable authors and publications refer to it.

Mr. Page put the same principle to work in SEO when he came up with the idea of assessing pages in terms of Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Essentially, saying that a site has high EAT is like saying that website knows what it’s talking about, and everybody who knows what’s what trusts that website as a reliable source of information.

Now that EAT is the main criteria of the quality of a website, adding links to high EAT sites on your page is probably the best thing you can do if you want to improve your rankings in the search engine results pages.

It has become more important than ever to build backlinks to high quality sites, rather than just building the highest possible number of links, even if their quality is questionable.

Some Tried and Trusted Link Building Strategies

If you are in a position to pay for some assistance with your link building, you’ll find many websites where you can buy backlinks – but as a solo blog owner, you might prefer to get backlinks free of charge from one of a number of sites.

Outside of getting links from a service, there are several ways in which you can optimize your link building process to help you build backlinks.

1. Guest posting

As a blog owner, if you want to build backlinks that will really boost your credibility, one of the best things you can do is ask to guest post on reputable blogs on topics that are related to your own blog.

The more effort you put into creating a top-notch piece of content, the more likely it is that highly credible websites or blogs will be interested in publishing your content.

When choosing a site to publish your guest blog on, look for one that is as closely related to your content as possible. That will allow you to build backlinks that will really work for you.

Whenever you find several suitable sites, pick the ones with the highest domain authority, since high DA means high quality backlinks.

In addition, having a post on a high-DA site will boost your own DA.

2. Ask for Reviews

Another good way to get backlinks is to ask for reviews.

The vast majority of consumers read online reviews before choosing products or services online – but even if your blog does not concern products or services, positive reviews always help build backlinks and make you more visible.

Of course, another benefit of reviews is that they can help boost your SERP rankings, and, if you can get reviews posted by an authoritative source, that will help with your DA score as well.

3. Publish original research

On the one hand, having catchy slogans and eye-catching graphics can undoubtedly help to lure people to your blog and may even help you build backlinks.

On the other, the more interesting and informative content you publish, the happier your visitors will be, and the more likely they’ll be to investigate your site further.

If you are a blog owner, one of the best types of valuable content you can add is research articles. Publishing research articles or other industry publications also allows you to build quality links – and journal articles normally have high DA scores, so that’s an added bonus.

Not everybody is a researcher, but what a win if you are in the position of being able to publish a study you performed yourself! Then, when people refer to your research, that’s another way to build high quality links, plus another way of boosting your EAT.

4. Publish step-by-step/how-to guides

Publishing step-by-step or how-to guides is another way for a blog owner to deliver value.

These guides can enable somebody to do something he or she has never done before or has no knowledge about. They provide concrete, practical advice about how to do something useful.

This type of content not only rewards the loyal viewers of your blog, but also encourages other authoritative websites to post outbound links to your blog post.

5. Include links to other blogs

Blogs have a social function. They allow people to state their own opinions about topics that are important to them, and get their opinions read and discussed by people with similar interests.

That’s why it’s a good idea for every blog owner to build backlinks to other people’s blogs. It helps gets people talking.

In addition, linking to other people’s blogs can help you build backlinks. The more you link to someone’s blog, the more that person is likely to take an interest in your blog, and the more likely you are to get incoming links from the person.

6. Maintain helpful lists of resources

Up-to-date lists of helpful resources provide value to your readers, plus provide plenty of opportunities for link building.

If another blogger finds a good resource list on your page, the temptation just to link to your resource list will normally win out over having to make up a new resource list from scratch.

7. Write a book review

When you review a new book that’s come out (and if you’re fair and accurate), there’s a good chance that the book’s author, or readers, or both, will link to your review. That’s an excellent way for you to build quality links!

When you give thoughtful review of a popular book, it shows that you are intelligent, and well-informed about your topic.

Plus, it’s one of the least spammy types of content you could possibly get!

8. Keep your eye on current affairs

When a breaking news story takes the public by storm, everybody will be searching for it online.

If you’re quick, and you comment on the story on your blog, you will be able to take advantage of the public interest before everybody else gets round to commenting.

This will provide an excellent opportunity for you to build quality links, because the number of sites linking to your blog will shoot up overnight.

9. Use humor

This tip works well with the one above. Funny memes spread more than most other types, but when you have something funny to say about a hot current affairs topic, that spreads twice as much.

If you really want to build backlinks (especially if you’re a blog owner), you need to put your sense of humor to work!

Take Advantage of Local Readers

In the business world, large corporations can easily wipe out their competitors by creating an advertising campaign, and it hardly even dents the budget of the large corporation.

However, when it comes to building backlinks to their websites, small or local businesses are at less of a disadvantage.

Although small or local businesses may not be able to compete nationally, they can and do compete locally.

Google has taken steps to ensure that they deliver the most relevant results to all search queries, and one of the ways they do this is to use location data, in the form of locational search keywords and IP address geolocations.

As a solo blog owner, you don’t need to compete with big companies or popular figures: to stand out, you just need to add unique local flavor.

You need to build backlinks to your site on popular local business or social websites.

How to Build Quality Links to Non-English Websites?

Because of Google’s improved ability to analyze the context and intent of queries, keywords have become less important than they once were for English searches.

Google’s latest algorithm can easily distinguish between pages that commit keyword stuffing and pages that are genuinely relevant to your keyword.

But it took Google years to perfect its current algorithms, and even so, they are still far from perfect.

Foreign SERPs have not even nearly kept up with the progress made by Google in terms of contextual relevance and EAT. In 2023, the quality of non-English search engines is pretty much the same as it was in 2013.

Therefore, for non-English SEO, there is no need for building backlinks with high EAT, since this is not something that non-English search engines can pick up on.

It doesn’t matter whether the inbound links are genuinely related to your site, because Google doesn’t understand foreign languages well enough to assess the EAT of non-English pages.

You can build quality links even if the content of those pages is not strongly related to your own.

Tips and Tricks for Non-English Link-Building

It seems there is quite a good opportunity for non-English site owners to build quality links to high-authority sites, even if the content of those sites is not strongly related.

But it’s definitely a sneaky tactic. If and when foreign SEO catches up with Google, anybody using sneaky tactics like this will probably regret it.

There’s no need to use these tactics to build quality links. There are plenty of legitimate ways to build backlinks without resorting to any of those methods.

Although the number of backlinks to a certain website is the number one thing that places the site high on the SERPs, it doesn’t work if the backlinks and the website are in different languages.

Google can easily tell the difference, which is why the language in which the links are written needs to be the same as the language spoken in the country where people are viewing that page.

If you want to build quality links for foreign language pages, some of the considerations are the same as for English pages – but there are also some unique factors to consider.

1. Focus on content

If you are a blog owner, you want people to click your links, whatever your language or the subject of your blog. If you want them to click your links, you need to make it worth their while.

Virtually nobody would intentionally click a link that takes them to promotional content – but lots of people would follow links belonging to a blog owner who regularly posts interesting, entertaining, or useful content.

2. Focus on quality

You might have to put more effort into designing really great content (in any language), but it’s usually well worth it. The more people that read your blog, the higher Google will rank you!

Be sure to use a few well-chosen images – but also be sure you don’t have too many images. If you have too many, your page will take longer to load, and many visitors will get fed up.

More than half of all visitors to a site will move on if they have to wait more than 3 seconds for an image to load.

3. Boost your rankings with guest blogs

This is related to the above point about quality. If you write a high-quality post, high-ranking blogs are likely to publish it, thus boosting your DA and Google rankings.

4. Translate your content

It might be true that most people can understand at least a bit of English, but that does not mean that foreign language speakers want to read English if they don’t have to!

If you are a blog owner, you need to make the effort to translate your content into the native language of your target audience.

Conclusion

Well, at least now you can’t complain that it’s too difficult to find out how to build quality links! This article is packed with practical advice to help you with your link building as a solo blog owner.

You’ve learnt how to find and fix broken links, how to build quality links, and even how to make the most of link-building for non-English websites. Now get out there and build quality links to your blog today!